RE: Jumbotext - A New Feature to WWW

Now we shouldn't have RAW WAV for it, but rather a good speech technology.
It must also be usable for people with slow links (40Kbps). Wave becomes
extremely large if you have enough words....

Remembering the times of Windows 3.1 (6 years ago) Creative Labs has
software that spoke words, you simply has a word and a 'speech word', with
the sounds. This made it easy to speak a word without knowing it actually.
Who-ever some words need special pronouncements, so this must be downloaded
and that is relative small. Dictionaries are not that simple, but what I
think about is offline usage, and your system can work only if you are
online.....

Maybe suggestions to improve for both????



Joris Dobbelsteen



-----Original Message-----
From: www-talk-request@w3.org [mailto:www-talk-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of James P. Salsman
Sent: dinsdag 4 juli 2000 1:29
To: www-talk@w3.org
Cc: joris.dobbelsteen@mail.com
Subject: RE: Jumbotext - A New Feature to WWW


>... Now since not everybody has a Speech system ...

More and more languages have talking dictionaries on the web all
the time.  English has at least a few, for example:

  http://dictionary.msn.com/find/entry.asp?search=pronounce

There you can get a RIFF (.wav) and AIFF audio clip of most words.

The trick is providing a useful way to add the selection (which can
be obtained differently on different browsers -- see:
http://www.webreference.com/js/column12/crossbrowser.html -- for a
working form/script example) URL-encoded at the end of your favorite
dictionary GET-method URL stub like the one above.

This should be easy, but if you open a new window, then you need a
way to refer to the window that you are studying from, because each
window can have its own selection.  That method would save only a
few copy-and-paste operations into the dictionary's own form, but
when browsing unfamiliar languages, easy access to a dictionary can
make a lot of difference.

Does anyone have a way to refer to the most recent selection from
a different window in J/ECMA/JavaScript?  I have a feeling that it
is probably possibly on each platform, but in different ways, like
obtaining the selection to begin with.

Cheers,
James
--
http://www.bovik.org

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2000 16:49:43 UTC